Derek Toomey

Parents Hearing Their Children Read: A Review. Rethinking the Lessons of the Haringey Project.

Summary This paper reports a review of over 40 studies of parents hearing their children read at home. It draws a distinction between ‘parent training’ studies and ‘parent listening’ studies. The former involve explanation and modelling, as well as monitoring and correction of parent teaching behaviours. The latter involve only explanation, but without monitoring and correction. It is argued that the success of the widely known and influential Haringey Project, a parent listening study, has been quite misleading. Four other parent listening studies in the Haringey tradition have failed to show significant effects on childrens reading test scores. By contrast, a substantial number of parent training studies involving parents of poor readers have produced significant effects. The only parent listening studies to show this kind of success have involved families of poor readers. It is argued that the widespread practice of schools sending home books for parents to hear their children read does little to help...

How Home-School Relations Policies Can Increase Educational Inequality: A Three-Year Follow-Up.

This paper reports research which investigated the possibility that the normal operation of home-school relations policies may increase educational inequality. In most schools, the site for home-school relations work is the school. Parents are invited to attend the school for various purposes (e.g. information evenings) for guidance as to how to assist their childs learning or to assist in classrooms. The parents who respond to these invitations are likely to be those who are more confident in dealing with the school and who offer more support to their childrens learning at home. As a result of their visits, they may gain information and skills which benefit their own childrens schooling through the help which they give at home. There is the possibility that there may be teacher expectation effects advantageous to the children of the high-contact parents. The research investigated these possibilities by examining the operation of home-reading programs in the preparatory (Prep) level classrooms of five disadvantaged primary schools in Melbourne in 1984. Parents were interviewed and teachers made systematic assessments of the childrens reading competence and ratings of the supportiveness of the home environment for school learning of each child. Initial analysis of the data suggested that the above possibilities may be true. The level of contact of the parents with the school was predictive of the childrens reading competences, after taking into account the support given by the families for the childrens reading development. The three-year follow-up showed that advantages in reading achievement remained for the children of the high contact parents, controlling for their Prep level competences and home background support for school achievement.

What Causes Educational Disadvantage

ent social classes, their collective social experience, are not very far back in the causal pattern ... If class differences really are causing these inequalities then there is only one way to finally abolish them: by removing the cause.&dquo; (Connell, 1972: 53) Oversimplificd a little, the argument is fairly straightforward: the operation of the labour market creates differences in the incomes and material conditions of families which in turn cause differences in the educational opportunities of their children. This oversimplification ignores two important qualifications. Firstly, Connell points out that material conditions are &dquo;not very far back in the causal pattern&dquo; and that &dquo;the ’reach’ of the class system is limited.&dquo; The familiar arguments about the fundamental determining influence of the economic sub-structure are thus modified to admit the independent influence of other forces. Just how far these forces can have

Linking Class and Gender Inequality: the family and schooling

Some feminists have argued that a womans class position should be determined by her own employment and work history, whereas Goldthorpe has argued that the family is the basic unit in class analysis, with the husbands occupation determining the class position of all family members, including the wifes. Goldthorpe denies that this position is an example of gender bias, claiming that class and gender inequality are separate issues. This paper argues that gender and class inequality are strongly interconnected, by virtue of the importance of the work in child‐rearing carried out by the wife‐mother and its effects on the childs scholastic achievements and life chances. It shows that within‐family processes are more important than class position in affecting childrens scholastic achievements. It further argues that childrens family environments are affected by the biographies of both parents. The institutional separation of the family, schooling and the work‐place means that there will be great variabili...

Educational Disadvantage and Meritocratic Schooling

The debate amongst Australian sociologists about the causes of educational inequality appears to be gathering momentum. Two major issues have been mooted. The first concerns the relative importance of ’cultural’ vis-a-vis ’economic’ influences in causing the restrictions on educational opportunity for lower-status children. Connell (1972, 1974) has emphasised the role of differences in wealth produced by the institutions of capitalism. In his view the resulting educational inequalities are made possible and acceptable within the society by the operation of a dominant valuesystem which is individualistic, competitive, progress-oriented and meritocratic, and which leads to a definition of educational failure as being individual rather than system-centred. He rejects the existence of class differences in values and supportiveness for educational success of a non-

'Two Problems of Educational Inequality': a Reply to Abbey and Ashenden 1

ing is an important agency for this symbolic violence in its legitimate functions of teaching meanings and moulding consciousness in a way which defends but masks the interests of the powerful, e.g., disguising class inequality as individual differences. The Australian debate on educational inequality within this Journal and elsewhere has centred around this question of the ’autonomy’ of the educational system, i.e., the relationship of ’subjective’, ’cultural’, ideological or conscientious factors to ’objective’ material or economic factors. It has asked how far the problems of educational inequality can be resolved by policies originating in the educational system in the face of large-scale and pervasive social structural forces. Abbey and Ashenden have entered into the debate by firmly asserting the primacy of the capitalist mode of production over these cultural and ideological forces. They claim that ’Social reality is a whole, constituted by relationships’ (1978: 12). This inter-relatedness is, for them, governed by the ’hidden structures’ of capitalism, ’... this continuous reality is a process of production based on nothing but the historical interactions of people in and through their material world’ (1978: 12). Those who recognise some degree of autonomy in the operation of the educational system and its amenability to policy manipulation, are in their eyes victims of a reformist illusion, the effect of which is to defend capitalism. They pose the central issues in the debate in the following way, &dquo; . work inside the system or out; reform or revolution; perlsonal liberation or social emancipation. Knight, Toomey and Edgar have opted ... for the first of each of these pairs, Connell for the second’ (1978: 12). Their accusation of reformism against me is spelled out thus: ’[In Toomey’s writing] the larger structures become a ’context’ within which the parts of life defined as relevant to educational inequality stand separate and largely untouched. moving according to their own rhythms, purposes and logic’ ( 1 ~78: 6). I am hence represented

Book Reviews : EDUCATIONAL POLICY AND EDUCATIONAL INEQUALITY, by Paul Lodge and Tessa Blackstone Oxford, Martin Robertson, 1982. 256 pp.

to decide ’which of the various situations studied by sociologists belong within the field of race relations’, some of the victims of racism in Britain have taken another path. They are analysing the dynamics of the situation they find themselves in. An article which examines the sociology of race relations in Britain begins ’There is a dangerous sociology abroad-a sociology of race relations-dangerous to the black cause it seeks to espouse. It emanates from the-ethnic unit at Aston University under John Rex’ (Boume and Sivinandan in Race and Class, 1980). There follows a stimulating critique of the work of Rex and other sociologists and the relationship between these academics, the political situation, and the black immigrants. Both in that journal and in the

44.00 (cloth,

This book, written for teachers, presents a prescription for the content of the school curriculum and a detailed social science syllabus at the secondary level, in the context of the issue of ’multi-culturalism’. The book starts well with the following general argument. Current approaches to multi-cultural education are diverse and fragmented, and suffer from an &dquo; ... exclusive concentration on cultural differences [which] obscures more fundamental causes of inequality of opportunity&dquo; (p. 15) in particular, class. Australian pluralism is that of an integrated polyethnic society-&dquo; ... pluralist at the family, local and private levels of ethnic group life ... integrated at other common national levels of government, the law, economy and so on&dquo; (p. 15). Distinctive ethnic and racial groups share a ’common cultural sub-stratum’ (p. 41). This requires a school curriculum which has a common core as well as reflecting cultural diversity. But also that common core should &dquo; ... include consideration of the dynamics of economic and political power-how and why minority groups, whether they be of ethnic, social class or cultural origins, are disadvantaged in relation to the